John Hendrix on "The Mythmakers"

Samuel Arbesman:

John, great to be speaking with you and welcome to the Orthogonal Bet.

John Hendrix:

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Samuel Arbesman:

Your book, The Myth Makers, it's fascinating. I think maybe a great place to start might be for you to explain a little bit what led you to explore and write about this friendship between CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien?

John Hendrix:

Well, I mean it really comes out of a heart of just being a fan, and I was so influenced by these two men and their writing and their sort of validation of the imagination. Then of course, I knew their works and they were important to me, and I actually had heard the idea and story of their fellowship and their friendship. And as I learned more and more about it, I just had this sense of, oh, people don't actually know how interesting this story is. And so, I make graphic novels. Everyone's like, why did you choose to make this a graphic novel? And it's like asking Picasso why he painted something. The media that I use is graphic novels, and so the trick is how to translate that into a visual format for a younger audience and sometimes an adult audience.

Samuel Arbesman:

So is this book geared towards a younger audience? I read it and loved it, but I imagine I could show it to my kids and they would probably love it too.

John Hendrix:

Yeah. And that's not just because people look at comics and think it's a kid's media, but yes, this was written for, my ideal audience is like a fourteen-year-old who has just been forced to read Beowulf for the first time, and is like, "I hate this. I don't understand it." Or the Canterbury Tales or something like that. And I just wanted to give them a window to the larger world of mythology, why they were enamored with the great Norse myths with the romances and how that led them to make these two fantastical worlds.

Samuel Arbesman:

I love that, and it seems as if their friendship really is rooted in this love of these fantastical worlds and the idea of myth and everything like that. How do you think about mythology and fantasy? I mean, because a lot of different, there's mythology, fantasy, there's fairy tales, and you explore a little bit of the distinctions and the similarities between these different things. How would you describe and define and distinguish these?

John Hendrix:

Yeah, I mean it hard to believe because we're in such a modern moment that is full of this stuff, that this is a fairly recent occurrence in literature. And I mean fantasy that is written for adults and taken seriously by adults. Of course, Tolkien and Lewis, when they were growing up, fairy tales were believed to be primarily for children, kind of baby food that you need when you're young and eventually you outgrow.

But of course, their friendship started with a love of Norse myth, much like if you were at a board meeting at your office and somebody across the table at the board meeting was wearing a Wolverine shirt and you were a super fan of Wolverine, you'd be like, "Oh, man." You would geek out together a little bit and say, "I can't believe you're here with me." And that's what Lewis and Tolkien did. They met at Oxford and were like, "I love these Norse myths." And of course, they joined this weird club together where they read Icelandic myths in Icelandic together. And this is what started them on the journey to realize maybe myths have more to say to us than humanity was really understanding at that moment.

Samuel Arbesman:

What are the aspects of myth that... What are they tapping into that's some fundamental human need or desire for maybe it's meaning making or whatever it is? What are the things that Lewis and Tolkien really resonated with?

John Hendrix:

Well, I think one of the weird things we do as modern people is we hear "myth," and the synonym in our mind is something that is untrue or something that is fake. And of course, the ancient myths were not believed to be fake, and they were not believed to be told as pure entertainment either. They were revealing something true about the world in the form of these epic grand stories.

And so what Lewis and Tolkien grabbed onto was that same pole, that same longing for meaning making in the world that came from the deep myths, and they latched onto that because it honestly made their heart sing and it created in them a feeling which they wanted to reproduce again and again, and that's what got them writing together and writing fantasy for adults. Can this discipline be taken seriously by two men in their forties at Oxford who had other jobs? I mean, that's the crazy thing. They did not know they were Lewis and Tolkien at the time. They were just two guys doing this hobby basically, that most of their colleagues would've looked down upon at the time. And so it really is a phenomenal study of just what passion can do between a group of friends.

Samuel Arbesman:

Was it the fact that they had each other as support that really kind of allowed them to do this, as you're describing this super weird thing that was kind of not frowned upon or people would look askance at? Was it the fact that they had each other that kind of made this possible?

John Hendrix:

My book certainly argues that they would not have made their best works without the other, and I'm not the first person to think that. I just think that it becomes so obvious when you see their letters, when you read their correspondence that what Tolkien needed the most was simply someone to encourage him and to say, "This is incredible. Have you thought about cutting some of the Hobbit talk at the beginning?" Or, "Come on, toddlers. You need to get through this passage of the dead marsh when you're stuck." That's what Tolkien needed. I mean, I think there is an alternative universe where Tolkien did not meet Louis, and at the end of his life, they just find 10,000 pages of The Silmarillion in his closet, and they're like, "Oh, weird. This language, philologist at Oxford created this weird story. Interesting."

And Lewis, the same way... He needed someone to help redirect his longing for story and to validate it into a worldview that made sense, that gave mythology and storytelling the highest seat at the table possible. And that was unavailable to him as someone who was a cynic coming out of World War II, had kind of disenchanted the universe, had no longer given a place for the magical to be real. He thought all fantasy stories were essentially lies and therefore worthless. And Tolkien gave him a different frame for that.

Samuel Arbesman:

Maybe worthwhile focusing a little bit on Lewis's kind of change of heart. I mean, he had a religious conversion. What was the path that he led? You basically said he went from this belief and disenchantment to recognizing there was a place for some of this kind of stuff. What was that to trajectory and what was Tolkien's role in all of it? Yeah, it's super interesting.

John Hendrix:

It's honestly crazy because Lewis, some people think he was the most well-read single person of the 20th century. Incredibly smart, and yet many smart people was skeptical of a world full of religious claims. And honestly, I get that. So his conversion is frankly astonishing, and Tolkien did not convert him. But what he did was Lewis was longing for validation of his imagination. And he said early on, one of the greatest sorrows of his life was that everything he loved the most was imaginary and everything that was real and verifiable was grim and empty. And so he was waiting for someone to put the key in the lock and open the door to the idea of the imagination as being a way into greater meaning and actually coming alongside the greatest truths in the world and marrying the sort of all fact is truth, but not all truth is fact. And that's what Tolkien gave him. And it was through the Christian framework that allowed Lewis to grab onto that idea. And really, Lewis would not have written any of his works without that simple foundation stone that Tolkien gave him.

Samuel Arbesman:

And you mentioned, and a lot of this was in the after World War II, but then they also served in World War I. What were the impacts of the world wars in kind of how they thought about the world? I mean, I can kind of detect a little hint of that in terms of the earlier Lewis stuff, but how did that impact their lives?

John Hendrix:

Well, they were really interesting in that they served in World War I of almost in the same area of France a couple of years apart. They really should not have survived. Both of them barely escaped with their lives, and yet they came home in two very different places. Tolkien, his worldview was not marked by the cynicism that a lot of soldiers came home from World War I with, and Lewis came home with it, too. His poetry at the time was extremely, it was kind of in his head, it was very self-serving. And it was bitter, like a lot of the literature that came out of World War I. And so it is quite astonishing that when they found each other, they were in very different places, and yet they both came away, within their fiction today, when we think about their work, an incredibly optimistic, enchanted view of humanity and the peoples of their world.

So that was very much in contrast with what was happening in the world around them, including World War II. And many people have sort of argued that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is basically an entire sort of allegory about the atom bomb, and he always kind of pooh-poohed that, but on some level, they are right that it is about power. It's about how you defeat power, not with power, but with weakness, which of course is a very Christian concept. And yes, they were absolutely affected by the wars, but honestly almost the opposite way that you might think.

Samuel Arbesman:

Was that one of the reasons that you think they might have connected with each other? In addition to the love of imagination and myth? It was like they had this unexpected response to war. Do you think that was another feature of their friendship?

John Hendrix:

Yeah. I mean, in many ways they also shared this profound sense of loss bringing into the war. Tolkien was an orphan. Lewis had lost his mother young, and his father sent him away to England. He grew up in Ireland, so he was basically alone after the death of his mother, just like Tolkien. And so they were both these sorts of islands in the world, and they had both experienced war, and yet they were two different places. And so when they met, Lewis suddenly began to feel like the old version of himself when he was with Tolkien. Because they would read these stories. He would be with other people that loved the rich mythology, that awoke something in his heart that he was like, "Why can't I have this again?"

And Lewis slowly became a theist. He basically said, "Okay, I will surrender the idea that God might be a possibility." And then eventually he just started spending so much time with Tolkien that you would think he would've become a Catholic like Tolkien, but they didn't go that way. And in fact, their difference together is actually one of the things that contributed to the, in the end of their friendship, the sort of tension that started to arise after many years of friendship together is those theological differences, which is kind of interesting.

Samuel Arbesman:

Oh, so you think, right, you mentioned, yeah, there's this tension or falling out or maybe a distancing as they got older. Do you actually think it was more theologically based because that was more of the core of what they were thinking on?

John Hendrix:

Yeah. I mean, it is not like they had arguments about theology, but the core of it was Lewis married a woman who had been previously divorced. He knew that Tolkien would've been upset with that as a Catholic, and Joy had, her husband was abusive. I mean, it was the most justified divorce in the world, and yet they kind of both avoided the subject. And so just like British men who didn't talk about their feelings, there was just things that began to build up and create this tension of separation over the last 10 years of their life.

Even at the moment when their work was getting the most kind of praise from the world, there was this sort of dimming of the past sort of companionship they had had, which at its height was as close as two friends can be. And really were collaborators and kind of the closest sense where they really did need the other to make their best works.

Samuel Arbesman:

Going back to their work, you mentioned they love this mythology and these fantasy stories, and they wanted to make them for adults. I mean, they both started writing, I guess their stories, initially started writing for children. I mean, the Lord of the Rings only came after The Hobbit, which was much more a children's story. In the case of Tolkien, they're like, the Chronicles of Narnia is pretty much for children. I don't know when Lewis had written, he'd written some other science fiction. I don't know if that was before or after. I think that was more for adults. Was this sort of the gateway to thinking about stuff more for adults? They had to kind first do it for children that was a little bit more acceptable and then sort of work their way to thinking about fantasy and mythology for adults.

John Hendrix:

Well, it's funny. They actually went in the opposite directions from each other, and I'll tell you a little story. They met an eagle and child. This was in the thirties, and they decided to flip a coin. And this was right after the Hobbit had been published, and they had both dared each other to write good fantasy or science fiction for adults. They flip a coin just like Mary Shelley's bet in Frankenstein. Heads? So the person who got heads would get space travel. Tails, time travel. Lewis got heads and wrote The Space Trilogy for adults, and an incredible series of, your audience hasn't read it, but of course he wrote it basically instantly. They all got published, driving Tolkien insane. Tolkien wrote The Lost Road, which became part of the Silmarillion story. He abandoned it later, but it became the Numenor myth inside of the Silmarillion.

But basically it was kind of a wash for Tolkien. And so he was at a place where he was regretting that the Hobbit was for children and almost rewrote the Hobbit when he got stuck on Lord of the Rings to age it up. Whereas Lewis, after the Space Trilogy went to Narnia. So they went to the opposite direction. Tolkien started with the Hobbit and ended up with Lord of the Rings, and Lewis did the opposite. So in some ways, the tension later on in their friendship also came from, Tolkien famously hated Narnia and felt it was very sort of thin in terms of its mythological framework. And I think some of it was a little sense of betrayal about abandoning this shared project of serious fantasy for adults

Samuel Arbesman:

And the world of Narnia doesn't feel as deeply grounded and Middle Earth feels very much like, "Okay, I'm going to create a whole language and some maps, and then I'll build stories on top of those kinds of things," versus the other way where it's like, "Here's a story and let's just explore it." And it's a little bit made up along the way. How do you think about world building in terms of mythology? I mean, especially going back to what you're talking about in terms of myths, of these are stories that are trying to portray facts about the world. Or sorry, not facts, I think more about truth. You were kind of talking about this idea of features of the world. They're supposed to teach us something or kind of portray something. Do you feel that there needs to be this rich world building, the Tolkien level world building? Or can you have some verisimilitude and kind of more like a Potemkin world building and that's good enough? How do you think about that?

John Hendrix:

Well, yeah. I mean, this was the whole tension in the way Lewis and Tolkien approached it. In the book. I sort of sketched this out in a kind of simplified form. I say that mythos and logos were the two ways that these men created, and logos being word, precision, accuracy, language. Like Tolkien started with a language. I mean, more specifically, he started with the phrase, "A star shined on the hour of our meeting." That phrase, he wanted to create a language and a world where that made sense. All of his world came out of this desire to fabricate language. And whereas Lewis was a story person, a mythos person, and to him the story, the supposal, the concept of the larger narrative is what drove him into a story. And the world building, it was almost like if you think of Narnia more as poems as opposed to world building, they make a little more sense.

In fact, well, there's an amazing book. I won't get into it too much, but for any of your listeners who are really into this idea of was Narnia thin? An incredible book by Michael Ward called Planet Narnia, who was a scholar at Oxford who basically goes through the Narnia books and believes that Lewis, because he was obsessed with medieval cosmology, had tagged each one of the books in Narnia to one of the seven heavenly bodies in medieval cosmology. And so that each book retains features and poetic ideas representing those planets. And I was very skeptical when I first heard the concept, but he won me over. And to me, that's a perfectly Lewisinian thing to do. To be like, "No, this is just this world I put together." But secretly, it has this beautiful poetic architecture on it.

Samuel Arbesman:

Related to, you were talking about, they both kind of became successful sort of around the same time, but not quite. How did their varying levels of success and fame at different times and in different fields, how did that affect the friendship?

John Hendrix:

Yeah, yeah, it's such a good question. I mean, people don't realize that Lewis became literally a hero of England in World War II because he was asked to do these radio sermons basically, to sort of stiff upper lip the English people, to sustain them in the blitz. And he wrote these really compelling sort of everyman defenses of religious beliefs, specifically Christianity, that has been collected now and in a work called Mere Christianity. And Lewis, of course, he had this booming voice. He always could command a room. And Tolkien on the other hand, was kind of mousy, always had sort of a "by the way" approach and kind of mumbled sometimes. And he was very sort of offended that anyone would write religious works or put themselves in a place of authority if they had not gone to seminary or studied. And so he took Lewis's sort of confidence in all things and very fast approach to writing as kind of misplaced and maybe even a little prideful.

And so that did begin to build the tension. But Tolkien himself was most worried about people not enjoying his work or misunderstanding it. He never had a longing for fame, and frankly, he didn't understand a lot of the success of Lord of the Rings in America, specifically, where it began to merge with fan culture. People were dressing up as the hobbits or doing hobbit parties. I mean, he was often very confused by that as a lifestyle choice. And really it's the dawn of fan culture, is Lord of the Rings in America along with Star Trek. This launched the idea of fan culture today

Samuel Arbesman:

With Lord of the Rings in America, if I recall correctly from your book, one of the ways it became successful was these unlicensed versions. Which, and it spread I think through the hippie culture as well. Can you talk a little bit more about how that happened in the United States?

John Hendrix:

It's a crazy accident of history. The reason why they took off in America was Ace Publishers decided through a copyright loophole, I mean, they knew what they were doing, but they just published the versions of Lord of the Rings in America, and they were like a buck apiece. They were super cheap, and over a million of these sold. And they were on college campuses, and this is where you get the "Frodo Lives," "Tolkien is Hobbit-Forming," "Gandalf for President." I mean, there was all these badges and stickers and stuff that we now recognize as being merch that infiltrated the culture. So much of so where Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin are writing songs about Lord of the Rings, I mean, truly-

Samuel Arbesman:

Right. Like Mordor is mentioned in there. Yeah.

John Hendrix:

It doesn't make sense that Tolkien would lead this lifestyle fad 6,000 miles away in America, but it happened all through these illegal copies that got passed around.

Samuel Arbesman:

That's wild.

John Hendrix:

I mean, the countercultural idea of that, I mean, you can read counterculture into it, but from how we think about it today, it just seems odd.

Samuel Arbesman:

Do you think, well, obviously the movies certainly gave it a new life, but in between the movies and the counterculture moment, were there other waves that also happened for Lord of the Rings that were kind of unexpected?

John Hendrix:

Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways it benefited from Tolkien basically starting D&D and the sort of D&D visual culture that then led to the Tolkien calendars in the eighties. There was the Rankin and Bass Hobbit movie that was very popular at its time. And again, it was a subcurrent. Basically all fantastical fantasy works owed their lineage to Tolkien, and it was just kind of universally acknowledged. In fact, it's hard to imagine a fantasy framework outside of that in some ways. Once we get to the movies, then there is a kind of permanent visual culture contribution to what Tolkien looks and feels like. Now, when you think of certain images from that show, Sauron himself or the Tower of Barad-dur, we think of the Alan Lee illustrations from the concept art from that film. So yeah, that's where it really took a cultural turning point.

Samuel Arbesman:

I can't remember when both of them died, but was Lewis around during kind of the fan culture growth of Tolkien stuff, and how did he process? Because Narnia never really had the same fan culture. Obviously the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has been very successful, and people talk about Narnia. It's not quite the same level. How did he think about that?

John Hendrix:

Lewis had died before the stuff really took off, so he didn't experience that. Where it's different from Tolkien is in America, Lewis became a hero to American Christians. But frankly because of his work, The Screwtape Letters, he was on the cover of Time and then Narnia, he had a level of fame in America in Christendom, very different than Tolkien. Tolkien was not associated with the larger Christian project at all until kind of much later. And people sort of regained the Catholic ideology and some of the imagery that are inside his stories. And honestly, I think people in America had no idea that they were really connected theologically or in friendship.

Samuel Arbesman:

Certainly reading Narnia, you got the Christian messages more clearly than Lord of the Rings. But, yeah. How has Lord of the Rings kind of fit into the Christian community more broadly or more recently?

John Hendrix:

Yeah. I mean, it's funny. In the last 15 years, I think there's been a kind of movement to put it alongside Narnia in terms of one of the great Christian works of fiction and fantasy. If you just make a list, I did this the other day because certainly you can look at Narnia and be like, okay, I see the Christian allegory, especially in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In the rest of the books, it's not as clear. They're really just good fantasy books. Last Battle is like Revelation.

But in Tolkien's work, you have so many sort of soaring themes of creation, of this idea of power will be destroyed by the weakest thing, not the strongest thing. All of Lord of the Rings to me is about a longing for home and a longing for restoration. And Tolkien kind of put this new creation worldview from the Christian theology into the Grey Havens, the idea of redemption, of awaiting a king to come back and sort of redeem the world from the Satan figure, the literal Satan figure of Sauron. So yeah, it's just very interesting to see how these themes kind of crisscross in their two works.

Samuel Arbesman:

Going back to myths and mythology, and you mentioned that prior to Tolkien and Lewis, there really wasn't much of this modern mythmaking and writing myths. And now, and we have superhero movies and all these kinds of things, which maybe you'll include in that, maybe you won't. But since that jump-started this modern mythmaking, where have you seen other people trying to do this? What are the ones that have succeeded? Which ones do you feel like that have never quite taken off? Are there ones that you feel like should have a wider audience? How do you think about modern mythmaking?

John Hendrix:

Yeah, I've always wondered why do stories grab us in a certain way? For whatever reason, 10 years ago, Game of Thrones went from a thing that a lot of fantasy nerds had read to truly a cultural moment. Everyone knew what the red wedding was. And I mean, this is something Tolkien and Lewis would not have believed. I mean, truly. To have mainstream culture every day, workaday people talking about a story that involved dragons and this deep mythology would be stunning. I mean, really it's a conquering of the media space that fantasy stuff has done this. And yeah, I think most of the good stuff has its roots in writing first. Not that you can't make great stuff for the screen. I mean, I think Star Wars in a lot of ways is more fantasy than science fiction of course. I tend to think the best stuff starts in the mind of a single person writing a story that they care about, and often those adaptations flow from the great work on the page first.

I think that's in some ways why Game of Thrones towards the end of its cycle on TV got worse, because they ran out of material on the page. And in fact, actually my pet theory about Rings of Power is that, I like Rings of Power, but I think it's going to do the opposite of Game of Thrones. I think it's going to get better as it goes, because they have more content at the end. The beginning was where they were making up the most stuff in a way. And now we're going to get to the things that we all recognize and Tolkien wrote about.

Samuel Arbesman:

There's obviously a lot of fantasy, but who would you put, not just in the fantasy category, but in current myth makers? Are there any writers that kind of stand out? I mean, you mentioned with Game of Thrones, but are there other ones?

John Hendrix:

It's funny. I think of graphic novelists now. I mean, partially this is my own obsession with that kind of work, but there's an artist, Tim Probert has this series called Lightfall, which is this amazing mythological world building that has kind of an epic creation story, a big baddie, the hero's journey stuff. I'm such a sucker for that. Again, I get all the feelings that Tolkien and Lewis get when they read those things. I get them, too. That's why I made this book. That's why I basically made a myth out of Tolkien and Lewis themselves in this book, they become a mythology. Their friendship becomes a myth in and of itself. And so yeah, I read a lot of Mobius. I love stuff that pairs word and image together, and that's how I really get the feels from storytelling.

Samuel Arbesman:

And there's a lot of people who talk about, like in the tech world, there's a lot of big ideas that kind of maybe spark from a need for myth. So whether it's talking about the singularity or certain things around existential risk in AI or certain things around the simulation hypothesis. Do you kind of feel that all those stories or stories or theories or whatever we want to call them are basically the tech world realizing that there's this myth gap in their lives and they kind of need to fill it with all this kind of stuff? How do you think about that?

John Hendrix:

Okay. Well, I think one of the reasons, there's a big question. Why did Tolkien and Lewis take off when they did? Because there had been stuff before them that had been written. William Morris wrote rich fantasy for adults, George McDonald, Edison. There were examples, but they didn't catch on. And I think it's because the moment after World War II, the world had been basically disenchanted. I know I've used this world several times, but I think it's really profound. If you look back to the Enlightenment, it had removed all the sense of enchantment from the world, and we were ready for something to be magical and to be amazing again.

And so it does not surprise me that you say there is a mythology gap out there. Because yes, I mean, I do think, if I can put my theological hat on for a moment, I think all human beings are longing to be inside the great story, and we want to know what that story is. And technology seems to present a story that maybe sometimes runs opposite to the story we really want to be in. I think a longing for that deeper meaning comes from knowing what story you are in.

Samuel Arbesman:

One stream within the tech community is kind of certain ideas around progress, whether it's economic progress, technological progress, allowing certain possibilities for human flourishing and just choices and things like that. But alongside that, you also see, and I think you discuss this a little bit in the book of while, there was certainly a belief in progress prior to World War I, and I think the world wars kind of shattered that for many, many people. We see that a lot in the tech world, this belief in progress. How did Tolkien and Lewis think about progress and technology being a force for good versus a force for bad? That sort of shape of progress?

John Hendrix:

For those who haven't read the book, let me give you a little summary of that moment in their life. So the really interesting thing about the run-up to World War I is that in the late 1800s, humanity basically began to believe that through industrialization, medicine, technology, progress, diplomacy, that we were slowly solving the great problems of humanity. And that there were books written that were basically like, we don't have to have wars anymore. We've done it. Progress and humanity will keep going slowly upward to the point where we will achieve Utopia. We can do it. And then World War I came and basically shattered every single notion of that, not just the scale of the conflict, but just the brutality of it and the length of it. And then at the end, the utter pointlessness of it. Adults today cannot really tell you why World War I was fought.

And so this myth of progress is something that Lewis and Tolkien were not just writing about, but living inside of. That sort of loss of Utopia, the loss of belief in humans to solve our greatest problems. And so yes, this is one of the unfortunate things about reading history, is you start to see echoes from things that we have done before as a human species. And yes, I think in a lot of tech there is a temptation to believe that the technology can solve all of our problems and do all of our... Create that Utopia that is just outside of our grasp. I think Tolkien and Lewis would probably say that some magic is needed instead.

Samuel Arbesman:

So do you think it's possible then to almost have a myth or fantasy that kind of incorporates maybe a positive view of technological progress, but alongside an incremental approach towards change or some humility in terms of our ability to actually... Is that something we need or it's kind of one or the other? And I wonder if this is also connected to, and you were talking about how Star Wars feels much more like fantasy than science fiction. Science fiction, it'll have a view of the future. It might be a negative view of the future, but there's many positive visions of the future. While fantasy, certainly more medieval inspired fantasy, feels very past-looking. How do you kind of think about progress and incremental improvement and a willingness to believe in a better future alongside all these different ideas?

John Hendrix:

It's funny. I am quickly getting outside my area of expertise, but I have read some hard science fiction like Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. And that is a version of science that is trying to solve our climate issue with imagining these incredible scientific solutions. And I think that science fiction often sits in hard opposition to fantasy because of these different, I mean, one almost is logos and one is mythos in a way. And the fantasy is sort of trying to have us almost escape the reality of our world in a way, and to provide these really sweeping narratives as to purpose and hope and reason.

That's why Star Wars is more of a fantasy than a science fiction. Because no one is really trying to understand how the Millennium Falcon works. And in some ways, I think that's why I've always been much more interested in fantasy. Because I'm longing for these more poetic solutions as opposed to how actually are we going to blend this world together? And I think you're right. I mean, there must be a way to write fantasy, like future-oriented fantasy that is still grounded in our universe in some way. It's a really interesting idea.

Samuel Arbesman:

To be honest, I have no idea what it would look like. I lean more towards the science fiction world, but I recognize that fantasy provides this space for myth and meaning, kind of larger stories. Science fiction can have that too. Oftentimes when science fiction moves more towards that, like a space opera or something like that, it often feels more like fantasy. Going back to the Star Wars thing, what would you tell people who are thinking about writing modern mythology? And is that even something that people consciously try to set out to do nowadays? Or is that something you just stumble upon and you're like, "Oh, I'm dealing with a lot of big issues." Is that something we should be doing deliberately? And if so, what would you tell people if they're trying to think about this?

John Hendrix:

Yeah. Well, I do think of the WH Auden quote in his poem where he is writing about the death of Yates, where he said, "Poetry makes nothing happen." And there is a sense of making any art is basically doing intentionally nothing, or at least beauty is essentially useless. So I run a graduate program where I get students to come and they want to be illustrators and they want to write their own comics and graphic novels. And on some level, you have to sit in the idea, in that we are going to make some artwork and we don't know what this is going to do for the world. We don't know how it's going to be useful. But art has this sort of weird power to it where you can kind of say those things in no other way than in that particular art form.

So I would encourage people to write myths, and if you can take a lesson from Lewis and Tolkien, do it in community. Your work always gets better in community. It feels like that's not true. But Lewis and Tolkien not just had each other, but they had the reading group the Inklings, and that was extremely essential. Making art is about being alone for a huge chunk of the time, and you need other people to make your best stuff. So yeah, I mean, I would say read books. Read as much as you can, try to write or draw every day in a small amount. And the third thing is have a quick group with people. Those three things, that'll help make your work better.

Samuel Arbesman:

Lewis and Tolkien seemed very deliberate in how they structured. I think there were actually two reading groups they had, there was a series of groups. How do you think about building these kinds of communities? Is this something that was very distinctive to the Oxbridge world of this time, or is this something that anyone can do given kind of sufficient intention?

John Hendrix:

I know. In some way, this vision we have of the Inklings is almost as much of a fantasy as Narnia and Middle Earth. I am a professor at a university, and the amount of times I take my buddies to the bar and the pub and read poetry together, it's only six or seven times a week. No, no. It's like never. Right? So there is a fantasy to this. But yes, I mean they were very intentional. Like you said, on Tuesdays at 11 AM they met at Bird and Baby, at the Eagle and Child and had beers at 11 AM. That was just like, hang out time, talk about life.

And then on Thursday night, that was the serious reading group at Maudlin College with Lewis, and they would bring work to read to one another. So you're right, there was a structure and there was an accountability. If someone didn't show up, you'd be like, "Hey, where were you? You were supposed to bring something to read." And I think all human beings need a good deadline and some accountability. And so yeah, I do think that was a really essential lesson we can take. If you want to do your own reading group, be intentional, make a schedule, stick to it, and then call people when they don't show up.

Samuel Arbesman:

The group eventually fell apart. What were the problems there that caused that to fall apart, maybe as a cautionary tale, as you try to be intentional about these kinds of things?

John Hendrix:

Tolkien famously hated Narnia. I think in some ways that's a little overblown because you have to remember that Tolkien hated everything. He was very persnickety about his taste in art and literature. It's important to remember that the reading group that the Inklings had 20, 25 years where they were really important to one another. That's a long time. Their friendship as well was very long. As you got older circumstances in life changed. Lewis got married. Lewis did not tell Tolkien he was getting married. That was one of the things that really hurt Tolkien's feelings. They were folks that I think should have been more honest with one another. I mean, you can see how much they meant to each other, though. When Lewis died, which was actually quite sudden, Tolkien said that it had been an axe blow to the roots of his life to lose Lewis. And I think he really, he probably regretted the final years of their life together. And they had shared so much, it's hard to imagine that they would have made the works they did without the other person. So yeah, their friendship was really meaningful.

Samuel Arbesman:

Maybe one place to end would be, how do you think Lewis and Tolkien would think about the afterlife of their creation? Looking now at the success movies and things like that, was this myth making effort a success? Did it kind of get away from them? Is that the point of any myth? How do you think they would view all this?

John Hendrix:

I honestly think they would be stunned. I think they would be astonished. Lewis said, famously talking about how to approach literary criticism, that instead of making a spectacle of the author, use the author as spectacles. And I love that quote because it's sort of, for him, it was not a worthwhile activity to try to uncover all the hidden meaning in what an author's intentions were, but just to look at the work and use it as a lens to see the rest of the world.

I think on some level, while they would be less enamored with their fame, the wealth that is generated across the world, 250 million copies in print of this thing they basically dared each other to do in a pub. I think they would be amazed at this idea that people are seeing this enchantment of the world through that lens of their story and that it still is resonating. I mean, Greta Gerwig's doing a new Narnia movie. We've got Rings of Power and the new Gollum movie coming out. So I mean, it really is crazy that we're now 80 years on from these properties and they still feel extremely relevant to our cultural moment. I mean, that's stunning.

MUSIC:

(instrumental)

Samuel Arbesman:

That is wild.

Well, thank you so much. This was amazing. I really appreciate having the conversation with you.

John Hendrix:

Thanks so much.

MUSIC:

(ends)

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